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22

Feminine Intuition

6 :32 a.m. How did his powers work, anyway?

The rules were different with Vincent. There was no threat of death or injury on the job. He wasn’t like the police. Was he?

Marisol gulped the last of her now-cold coffee and set the empty cup on the windowsill. Not wired enough, she brewed another pot of coffee.

What if he was okay and at home in his pajamas, relishing in a saved day and the side of pussy he got from her? He beat her in the fuck-and-run race before she had a chance to put her feet on the starting blocks, didn’t he?

But he said that he loved her, that crazy son of a bitch. And he wasn’t a liar—well, not the kind of man to lie about that. Right? She slammed the cabinet doors shut and smacked around the little, plastic coffee maker, preparing to brew coffee with the same subtlety as she would destroy drywall with a mallet. Coffee-making reached an anti-climactic end with the quiet click of the ON button. The button glowed like Vincent’s commlink. Which made her think.

She rushed back to her bathroom. Vincent had set her ripped commlink next to her domino mask. She pressed it and ran to the window, but nothing changed.

She picked up her empty cup and headed to the kitchen for a refill. He was avoiding her, wasn’t he?

Whoop! Whoop! Honk! The car alarm blaring outside her window stopped her in midpour—the alarm coming from the once-empty alley. She poked her head out the window. Below, Vincent’s motorcycle honked and flashed its lights. All-the-more-strange because it was Vincent’s motorcycle without Vincent.

Marisol pulled on her clothes and crawled out onto the fire escape. She jumped down, landing in the alleyway just as someone chucked a bottle in her direction. A string of expletives followed that the shattering alarm—or her city-hardened ears—drowned out. She grabbed the handlebars and whispered, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” The handles heated under her palms, flashing white hot.

The alarm stopped. A woman’s computerized voice said with a broken inflection, “Mi espíritu recognized.”

Marisol would have to have a conversation with Vincent about her disdain for pet names, although my spirit was more-than tolerable and even a little perfect, but first, “Staci, where’s Vincent?” she asked the dashboard.

The alarm resumed.

If she wasn’t careful with the damn thing, the bottle-thrower wouldn’t miss this time. “No need to do that.” Another squeeze of her hands shut the alarm off again.

The seat slid back with a hiss of compressing air. A helmet emerged, and the seat clicked back into place.

Marisol craned her neck so hard that she risked a spinal injury. “Want me to get on?”

“Mi espíritu recognized.”

“I don’t have a Class M endorsement,” she said, as if that was the main issue–having the correct license, not an insistent A.I. and a missing boyfriend.

The computer repeated her pet name and lit up. Its electric engine softly whirred. Marisol put on the helmet. She swung her leg over the seat and teetered from foot to foot.

As soon as she steadied the bike, Staci chimed, “Destination determined.” Without manipulation, the motorcycle charged forward, screeching to a halt before entering the street.

Marisol fell forward and caught herself against the handlebars. “Warn me before you do something like that!”

“Destination determined.” The motorcycle pulled Marisol along into traffic .

Unlike riding the bus, the motorcycle offered no reinforced glass or metal frame between her eating pavement or winding up like a smashed bug on a windshield. She leaned forward and squeezed the sides of the motorcycle with her quaking legs. “Take me to Vincent.”

The motorcycle sped up and weaved between cars. Sweat interfered with her grip. Even if she could solidly rev up the motorcycle, she hadn’t a clue how to drive the machine. Instead, she relied on it to speed up and stop itself. At least the helmet muffled her screams because she doubted the seat would soak up her pee once the contents of her bladder jettisoned in terror.

The motorcycle zoomed between car lanes, cramming itself between side mirrors and teetering along the broken white lines between lanes. She closed her eyes, as if that would help her grow a shell and buffer against death. Speed vibrated her body as the motorcycle accelerated. Or was that her uncontrollable trembling? Dammit, she peeked. The motorcycle tailgated this car, zigzagged among those cars, and accelerated again. Perhaps Lamaze breathing would keep her from barfing up her heart.

She crossed the giant bridge, an amalgamation of cables, steel, and cement that united Shadowhaven’s east and west sides.

The Eastside was rife with the gentrified splendor of large open storefronts and impeccably shining windows. Even the concrete was white with promise. Shadowhaven’s industrial past was a sucked-out venom. She was near the docks where the row housing echoed the Westside homes—minus the bars in the windows and the bullet holes in the brick. The pitch of the engine lowered as the motorcycle pulled into an alley and stopped.

Marisol dismounted and removed her helmet, clutching it against her hip. “Where am I?”

The motorcycle turned its right blinker on.

Marisol eyed the building to her right. “Is Vincent in there?”

The dashboard read 45 and powered down. Shields emerged like reptilian scales and covered the motorcycle in a metallic gloss.

Marisol sighed. She lost the last shred of her mind depending on a motorcycle that contained the computerized soul of Vincent’s fake wife. After following the blinker, she discovered an entrance to an apartment complex. She pored over the dented call box for a clue while she moved her pendant up and down its chain. A peeling label said, “Enter Number and Press *.”

She let go of her necklace and entered 45 and pressed *.

A throat cleared over the speaker. “Hello?”

The magic of coincidence dropped her jaw. “Tobias?”

“What do you want?”

“It’s Marisol. Buzz me in. ”

A buzz shook the door as Marisol let herself inside.

Tobias stood in his doorway, brushing his teeth while pulling on a T-shirt. His unbuttoned jeans sat on his hips. He garbled, “I got you coming over at all hours too?” Toothpaste foam gathered in the corners of his mouth.

“Is he here?” Marisol jostled him and entered his apartment.

“Come in. Make yourself at home.” Tobias slammed the door behind him. He poked his head in a darkened doorway of his bathroom and spat. “He isn’t here,” he added as he zipped the fly of his jeans.

“Then I need your help.”

“I haven’t seen our friend since last night. Right after I saw you.” Tobias breezed past Marisol. She picked up his scent. No artificial pine aftershave this time. He reeked of sweat and stale alcohol, the smell of a rough night.

He picked up an empty pizza box off a bizarre, makeshift table made of particleboard and a stack of cement blocks. In his other arm, he collected multiple empty bottles—beers and a pint of whiskey—and moved to the small galley kitchen, where he put them in an unlined trash can. They landed with the piercing clank! of glass falling on glass. The inside of the trash can must’ve brimmed with empties. He placed the pizza box on the half-closed lid .

There wasn’t much more to Tobias’s apartment. A worn recliner sagged in Tobias-like shapes. A television, perched on another particleboard-and-cement-block construct, asked Are You Still Watching? He walked back to the living room, switched the television off, and tossed the remote onto his chair. “There’s this crazy invention where you can call to say you’re coming over at seven a.m.”

“Sorry. I can’t shake a bad feeling. I last saw him at midnight. When he said, ‘I l-’” The words caught in her throat. “But he hasn’t returned, and I found his abandoned motorcycle in the alleyway this morning instead.” Then she muttered, “Rather, his motorcycle found me.”

”This might come to you as a shock, but men can be full of shit.”

Marisol scoffed. It would be improper to draw a diagram of last night’s rooftop activities. But… “That is not the case.”

“Why? A guy never ghosted you?”

A guy never said he loved her, so she said, “He wouldn’t do that to me.” Her puffed-up insistence was more for quieting her doubts than defending Vincent’s honor.

But like a dog or a bee, she sensed that Tobias smelled her fear. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and said, “I know what’s going on.” He leaned until his lips hovered over her ear. “You’re dick drunk.” And he laughed at her .

What the ever-loving fuck? Marisol shoved him away and bound to the door. “If you’re going to be a pig…”

“That wasn’t a denial. What is going on with you two?” His question landed like an attack, and she barely had time to raise her fists.

She swallowed. Time to declare the truth. “We’re... seeing each other. It’s serious.” That wouldn’t be enough to get her off the ropes. She’d have to match blow for blow. “What’s going on with you two?”

Tobias waggled his eyebrows. “He didn’t exactly bend me over a cop car and take me, but I’m tempted to say ‘It’s serious’ just to watch how you squirm.”

She made a concerted effort to stay still. “Don’t be mean.”

He spoke through a yawn of lazily articulated consonants. “Have you checked his last-known whereabouts? You said your apartment. What about his place of residence? You know where that is, don’t you? Because you’re serious?”

“Like I said, bad feeling. His motorcycle brought me here first.”

“Following your feminine intuition.” He snorted a laugh and staggered back into the chair.

The attitude. His rough scent. The bottles. His lack of balance. It was like Dad at his worst. “Are you drunk? ”

He smacked his lips and looked at her, blinking slowly, with one eyelid out of sync with the other. “I’m... not always like this.”

She cocked her head, sensing a half-truth. “Just sometimes?”

Suddenly hoarse, he said, “Too many times.”

Her sinuses burned, reliving those anxious moments when things became too unpredictable in the Novotny household thanks to Dad and the bottle.

Tobias inhaled and squeezed the bridge of his nose. In that single breath, he rattled off, “You can’t file a missing person’s report for him. It would compromise his identity. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to send a couple of beat cops in the direction of our missing friend. That would lead to more problems.” He scratched at his stubble. “One of those problems being the Bloodsucker, I’m guessing.”

A spinneret of hope pulled her step-by-step from the doorway. “Yes.”

“What you have, kid, is a conundrum.” He cranked up the leg rest, the delicate spinneret destroyed.

“You won’t help me?”

He shut his eyes and rolled to his side. “I can’t help you. I don’t have a badge. I don’t have a gun. I’m as useful as a screen door on a submarine.”

Marisol shook her head. She couldn’t let him give up. Not “the nice shot.” Not the guy with the best clearance rate in the SPD. She charged into the bathroom and flicked the light on.

“What are you doing in there?” he called after her.

She opened the medicine cabinet and found a bottle of ibuprofen. Although the expiration date was cutting it close, they were good. After shutting the cabinet, she noticed in the mirror’s reflection a hole in the wall behind her. It was the size of a large fist.

Tobias stumbled into the doorway. Marisol eyed the hole. Dad had plastered the holes he punched in usually a day after a drunken bout. When he had sobered up, he sanded away the lumps. Yet, she always found them. New paint never caught light the same way. She poked at the wall, and a fragment dropped away. Tobias rubbed the back of his neck. “I was planning on fixing it.”

She handed him the ibuprofen and darted past him into the kitchen, getting him a glass of water. “Do you have eggs? You need a decent breakfast.”

“All I got is mustard.” He leaned against the refrigerator and swallowed back the pills with a gulp.

A school picture of a teen girl dangled from a magnet behind his shoulder. Marisol studied it as the upturned corners bristled against Tobias’s back. The girl had long, curly brown hair and lightly freckled skin. “Who’s the girl?”

“You weren’t supposed to see that.” His gaze shifted to the bottom of the glass .

Marisol sensed his embarrassment and dug her teeth into her bottom lip to hide a smirk. “Some advice, Quinlan? If she’s giving you her school picture, she’s too young for you.”

He moved the magnet and put the picture in a nearby cabinet. “You’ve never called me that—Quinlan.” The wrinkles in his forehead and the slight turn of his mouth hovered between pain and amusement.

Marisol released her lip. Her smirk faded.

He sniffed. “You’ve got a good hunch, kid. He wouldn’t send you here if things were hunky-dory.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” He wiped his hands over his face. “He programmed his motorcycle to find you and me. Maybe we can use it to find him.”

In the alleyway next to the apartment building, Tobias finished chugging a neon yellow electrolyte drink and chucked the empty bottle into an open recycling dumpster. He bit a giant chunk from a breakfast taquito that had spent the morning on the corner store’s roller grill.

Marisol put her hands on the handlebars. The motorcycle was dead, no longer searing in response to her touch. “I don’t get it. It worked this morning.”

Tobias wiped his greasy fingers on the lapel of his trench coat and gripped the handles as Marisol had. The scaly shields folded into themselves. A serpentine-shaped blue light beamed behind the fenders and wheel spokes. Staci’s oddly modulated voice said, “Detective Quinlan recognized.”

Tobias’s eyes widened. “It’s like a video game.” He stuffed the last bite of his taquito into his mouth and chewed it as if it was a piece of leather.

Marisol, brimming with two parts alarm and one part jealousy, shoved Tobias out of the way. “Can you take us to him?”

After Staci said, “Mi espíritu recognized,” then it repeated, “Destination determined.” An abstract grid of a map appeared on the screen, with a bold blue line tracing a path from point to point. The seat opened automatically and elevated another helmet from its recesses.

Marisol put on her helmet and mounted the bike. She flicked her head back and inched forward to make space for Tobias behind her. He strapped on his helmet that looked like a white overturned bowl. The motorcycle rocked under his weight as he took his spot behind Marisol. She said, “I’d hold on tight if I were you.”

Tobias hugged around her waist. “Tell me how you really feel, kid.”

“Figured I should let you know. I don’t have a motorcycle license.” Marisol flipped down the helmet’s visor.

“I’ll report you to the cops.”

The motorcycle carried them farther south along the river. They entered a neighborhood of skeletal abandoned homes. Plywood shuttered some doors and windows. But rot and gravity dragged down most of the hollowed-out homes. The road gradually became dirt as time and neglect returned the pavement into something more primitive. They stopped at a faded orange and white dead-end barrier surrounded by tangles of naked, drooping tree branches and bushes. The right turn signal flashed before it powered down again. Marisol and Tobias took off their helmets.

Tobias hung his helmet off the handlebar. “I’ve worked a couple of cases around here. Practically a goldmine if you’re murder police.”

Marisol flipped up her visor and huffed. At least Vincent couldn’t be a dead body, but he had warned of becoming—how did he say it?—permanently affected. She hooked her helmet on the other handlebar. “The signal pointed this direction.” She stepped into the thicket behind the barrier. The brambles snagged at her jeans.

Tobias charged past her, swatting the branches away from his head. In a few more swats and snags, they reached a clearing—a knoll blanketed in dead leaves. A tall chain-link fence bisected the hill overlooking Shadowhaven’s crumbling former meatpacking district. The brick building at the base of the knoll was the former Clark Slaughterhouse. Thirty years battered the logo into an impressionist outline. If Marisol squinted enough at the abstraction, she could make out the coyly posed cartoon pig with coquettish eyelashes. The place appeared like any patronized business on the Westside except for the brilliant chrome of the cars set against the dead weeds that wedged apart the broken service road.

Tobias hooked his fingers through the links in the fence. “Could he be in there?”

Marisol nodded, an uncertain feeling knotted into her belly. The motorcycle led them to a location that came with a rusty torture-chamber of possibilities for Vincent. Her intuition and that stupid computer needed to be wrong.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Gunfire echoed out from the slaughterhouse.

Guns and bullets were inevitable “natural” disasters. In other parts of the world, people had earthquake or hurricane plans. She had gunfire plans. Sometimes when growing up, she had to sit in her bathtub until a drive-by passed. Sometimes patients were stitched together with bullets still inside them. Sometimes people died from gunshot wounds. A lot of people had to live putting up with guns. Regardless, with guns and bullets, she had to act; she had to move. But now as the man who loved her could possibly be at the receiving end of the gunfire, she didn’t have a plan. Instead, she froze.

Tobias tossed his coat over the fence’s barbed wire and lumbered over with the awkward grace of a grizzly bear. At the top-of-the-line post, he reached for Marisol. She pursed her lips to edge out her mounting fear, ignoring Tobias’s outstretched hand as she tossed her jacket over the barbs. She climbed with lizard-like speed. Tobias landed with a grunt on his knees. Marisol flipped onto her feet from the top and stealthily walked down the hill toward the building.

“No!” Tobias whispered and pointed along the fence that ended at the riverbank. He ran toward the river. It flowed along the edge of the meatpacking district perpendicular to the slaughterhouse. Marisol followed. He jumped off the bank into ankle-deep water. He motioned toward the large storm drain that trickled into the river.

They were a football field’s length away from the building. Traces of a rotten egg odor wafted from the entrance, strong enough to give Marisol pause. “What are you doing?”

Tobias stooped inside the archway, heading into the sewer. “We need to investigate. They’re packing heat. Safe to say, we don’t want them to see us.”

“Why do our adventures involve the worst smells?” She jumped into the murky water. The cold temperature stabbed into her bones as it drenched her boots.

In the entryway, Tobias programmed the map function of his cell phone. “Don’t wanna get lost.” He led the way down the tunnel. The walls closed in enough that even Marisol walked with a hunch. As the water reached under Marisol’s knees, Tobias turned down a tunnel and held out his phone as a light source. The farther they were from the outside entrance, the more the air grew hot and thick. Without a breeze, the putrid stench engulfed them.

Twenty feet ahead, light streaked through a grate. Tobias looked at his phone and whispered, “Bingo.” Yet he walked slower, not upsetting the gray water at his shins.

Marisol dug her fingernails into her palms to keep quiet. As they approached the light, Tobias hugged his body against the wall. Faint voices and footsteps pattered above them. Marisol joined Tobias against the wall.

A guttural voice thick with spit said, “I think I found a new favorite toy.” She had heard that voice the last time she cowered in the dark. The Bloodsucker.

Meanwhile, a syrupy substance dripped between the grates and plopped into the water. Tobias reached out and rubbed the substance between his fingers. Even in the shadows, Marisol saw his lips move. “Blood.”

Marisol pushed by him; the water sloshed around her knees. Her fingers dug into the divots in the wall. She climbed, fighting the weak grip of her wet soles.

Then she heard his voice, raspy and frail, but its sonorous quality was unmistakable. “You’re... just a... copy of me.”

Between high-pitched wheezes of laughter, the Bloodsucker said, “A copy that’s stopped you. ”

A loud crank followed by a sudden squeal and rumble of machinery shook the sewer walls. The sound covered Marisol’s splashing as she slipped down. She scaled the wall again, curling her toes into the uneven brick. Her fingers hooked through the holes in the grate. “Vincent,” she whispered.

The oppressive jangling of metal ceased. A single pop! followed it, like snapping of latex gloves. Through the grate, she could only make out a fraction of the scene. Vincent swung from a rusted meat hook that pulled him by his iron-bound wrists. The metal chafed his wrists bloody. The grate cut into the creases of her fingers.

She slid back into the water for relief. She heard the pop! again followed by—oh, her heart—Vincent whimpering. Again, she climbed and fought through the pain in her hands. Vincent dangled with a mound of chains around his legs. Blood and sweat matted the hair on his mask-less head. He flinched. Her arm muscles screamed in pain as she pulled herself up to get a better look.

Then she heard it again, the dreadful popping noise. His body dropped for a moment. The chains at his feet scraped the floor even louder. Oh God. The popping! The scraping! What was it? The force of the hook and chain wrenched his shoulders from their sockets. She held her breath to stifle a gasp, to hold back the nausea of her flipping stomach. And fell back into the water. No! She leaped up the wall. The tips of her fingers turned purple. She needed to see. Vincent’s body jerked up. The magic healing made the dislocation momentary. He was immune to the injury but not to pain. His breath heaved, in-out, in-out and— pop! He broke again. And again and again and again. How long could he take this before he became like them?

The Bloodsucker’s hooded head turned in her direction. Faceless circular rows of teeth pulsed toward a slimy maw, as if it could sense a mere droplet of Marisol’s essence. Plastic and cloth. Just plastic and cloth. It was only an illusion, but the nightmare—only days old—began once more.

The Bloodsucker jerked his head back to Vincent. Good, he hadn’t seen her, but there she was again, trapped, doomed to watch, and paralyzed by those teeth.

She took in a deep breath to scream.

Tobias’s giant hand cupped her mouth and yanked her down into the water. His fleshy paw muffled her cries. His other arm hooked her under her armpits, dragging her away. What in hell was he doing? Marisol thrashed against the wall of muscle, but he picked her up like a small child. She kicked and flailed wildly, to no avail. The light from the slaughterhouse became a flicker with distance. Vincent, tied up and bleeding, was farther and farther away from her. With another twist down a tunnel, the air became cool and fresh.

If Tobias wouldn’t help her, she’d have to do things herself. She only had to wriggle out of his grip. Crunch! She bit into Tobias’s palm, held over her mouth, and didn’t stop until she struck blood, but he grunted and held her tighter.

Outside the drain, he dropped her into a shallow pool. She faced her captor and seethed, picturing her eyes matching the black feral pupils that bored into her. She wiped the blood off her lips with the back of her hand. And saw red.